


And a partridge in a greenwood tree...

by Lilliburlero



Category: David Blaize - E. F. Benson, Maurice - E. M. Forster
Genre: Crossover, Crossover Pairings, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Mid-Canon, Post-Canon, Shooting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-09
Updated: 2014-12-09
Packaged: 2018-02-28 17:32:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2741060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Frank and David shoot partridge; Frank strays into the greenwood.</p><p>*</p><p>Advisory: animal death, internalized homophobia, references to blackmail.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And a partridge in a greenwood tree...

**Author's Note:**

> For [nineveh_uk](http://lilliburlero.dreamwidth.org/61161.html?thread=86249#cmt86249), who asked for 'Partridges: David and Maddox go shooting them. David and Maddox type discussions ensue. They may or may not be eaten with pears later,' and got this crossover dog's dinner (and no pears). My profoundest apologies.
> 
> I know absolutely nothing about shooting partridge, and don't to my knowledge have a beta who does. I welcome correction of any solecism.

The butler took Frank up a side staircase to the left of the main flight and into a small room, decorated and furnished in a style ninety years old: it could not have been altered since the days when the house belonged to George IV’s Lord Chief Justice. There was no fireplace and the outlook was quite indifferent, but a Hepplewhite easy chair stood in one corner, handsome despite its frayed upholstery and sagging seat, and the narrow bed was covered with a splendid lace counterpane, no doubt worked by a long-dead spinster of the house. The Chinese paper, he supposed, would have been faintly demodé when it was hung, a remainder thought suitable for this remote room. Now it was damp-stained and discoloured, but the hand-painted detail was nonetheless, to the eye bludgeoned by twentieth-century mass production, exquisite. Neglecting his trunk, he went to examine the little water-carriers, musicians and silk-weavers at close quarters. He had spent no more than a moment so diverting himself when he heard a familiar whistle, and had barely framed the word ‘come’ when David bounded in, the low sunlight at his back.

‘Frank! You came after all! I could almost kiss you!’

‘Don’t, though. Not _almost_.’ 

David laughed ringingly and enveloped him, caressing the nape of his neck and the small of his back. Frank, as he always did, gently broke the embrace.

‘Isn’t it ripping of Durham to give us these rooms? Just like being in college again. My bedroom’s poky too, but come and look at the study.’

‘Oh,’ said Frank, walking through, ‘you could shoot rabbits from here, look.’ He gestured towards the tall window with its view of lollipop-sunset, coney-dotted lawn.

‘I couldn’t,’ David admitted cheerfully, ‘I’ve never shot anything in my life. Bags invited me one vac, but my pater took me up an alp instead.’

‘Oh God. Sit down. There are rather a lot of things you need to know before tomorrow.’

But David proved, as he usually did at pursuits requiring agility and accurate aim, disconcertingly competent: his stance was a trifle eccentric, which everyone generously attributed to his left-handedness, but his footwork was nifty and he had an instinctive sense of sport, picking his mark decisively from among the birds well out in front and firing with enviable despatch. The worry that had made Frank’s night marginally more insomniac than usual, that he would jaw walking to or on the peg, proved unfounded. They broke for pies and sips from hipflasks after a couple of successful drives. 

Frank had accepted the invitation to Penge less in expectation of pleasure than to discover whether his affection for Clive Durham could survive a cool maritime climate. (He suspected it could not.) In Frank the need to be useful to others contended perpetually with his propensity to find them ridiculous: at Cambridge, where he had known him slightly, Clive had seemed precious and pompous; meeting him again in the hard clear light of Athens, Frank had seen a soul in pain, undergoing the renovation which Frank feared above all upon his own account, and had reached out accordingly. But now Clive seemed diminished nearly to the puny proportions of their undergraduate days: a bantam-brained, self-satisfied prig.

David, with his entire lack of the same qualities, neither perceived them in Durham, whom he was regaling with an account of a farcical Elizabethan pageant he had witnessed in Rye, where he had taken a cottage last summer to complete his first novel, _Trixie_ , recently published to fashionably scandalised acclaim. Irradiated by David’s mischief and want of malice, Durham seemed almost tolerable again. Frank, who had heard the anecdote many times, looked around, catching the eye of the young under-keeper who was returning from picking-up, a fugitive brace in his hand. It was a perverse and sardonic eye, set in a face seraphically sensuous; it saw into Frank and thrilled through him. He had to stifle a gasp.

That evening, Frank sat smoking in the study while David dressed.  He stared abstractedly at the portrait of an insipidly pretty youth over the bookcase: Florentine school, late 16th century, probably—a plaque on the frame read, speciously, _Michelangelo_. He thought again of the gamekeeper's impudent beauty.

‘Hullo, Frank,’ David said, emerging from his room. ‘Jolly decent day’s sport, I thought. I wasn’t an utter disgrace, was I?’

Frank tilted his head back and laughed. ‘You shot better today than Archie London ever shall in his life. He looked pretty green, and a bit more from trying not to show it. Didn’t you see?’

‘I thought the pie must have disagreed with him.  But, I say—I think I made a frantic bish.’

‘Oh—no; it wasn’t really what you’d call poaching, whatever that slow-coach London says. When a covey breaks quickly like that, it’s bound to—’

‘No—not that. Do you remember Durham’s great friend Hall?’

‘Oh.’

‘Well, yes. I asked for him—wondered why he wasn’t here this weekend, you know. It seems there’d been rather a terrific row. I tried to let it drop, but I think I’d touched poor Durham on a raw spot, and he became a bit—confidential. Do you know about it?’

‘Ye—es,’ Frank said slowly, ‘I mean, one doesn't jaw about these things, does one? I guessed when I met him in Greece there'd been some falling off between them. But men's friendships do change as they grow older and—well, dash it, you know this, you wrote me so, last year when I was at the British School—'  

Frank's throat still tightened at the thought of the letter and the conversation it had engendered, but these had heralded no breach between them greater than David's disinclination to accept Frank's opinions as wholly oracular; they now argued the merits of fast bowlers and slow movements on terms of approximate equality (rather to Frank's relief than otherwise, though he could discover in his weaker moments a slightly shabby nostalgia for his former heroic stature) but their meetings were as frequent as their respective work allowed and their attachment as deep as ever.

'But this is different, Frank. They quarrelled—over Hall's sister. I couldn't work out exactly whether it was because Durham wanted to marry her or he didn't—he wasn't really awfully coherent.'

That Clive's excruciating overhaul of temperament could have issued in such grossly banal conduct made Frank feel quite angry with him. 'Then it must have happened since he came back to England,' he said evenly. 'How simply ghastly for them. The girl as well, I suppose.'

David made a small expression of disgust. 'Look—I hate to speak in this filthy gossipy way about a chap, especially when there's a woman in the case. But what I meant to ask you is—oh, bother. I mean, when we go down to dinner I shall talk politics and games and whatnot, and I daresay there shan't be any strain on the surface of things. But it feels so horrid not to be able to think as well of people as one once did.'

'And don't you?'

'Well, no, I don't. It seemed so terribly childish a row to have. When I was quite a kid—I say, I hope I don't make you shy by telling you this—'

'I daresay I'll live it down it even if you do. But I don't know what it is yet.' 

David's colour rose. '—I used to hope you might marry Margy, so we'd be brothers and shouldn't ever have to—well, I thought it would make it all right always.'

'I fear Miss Blaize wouldn't accept me, even were I to muster the courage to ask her,' he said, affecting a humorous courtliness, though there was warmth in his cheeks which could not be attributed to the dim, lowering grate.

'Don't be absurd, Frank. She loves you almost as much as—'

'Not _almost_ ,' Frank interposed tactfully.

'Almost.' David said firmly, but his blue eyes were soft with the tender understanding that was between them. 'But you don't love her, not as men love women, and that's flat.' He spoke in the business-like manner with which he was wont, in his stories, to dispose of his characters' amorous connexions. 'I do want her to marry a decent fellow, of course, someone who knows cricket and with whom one might talk piffle. She's twenty-four now, you know,' an edge of concern entering his voice.

'Older maids have found happy consummation—'

' _Frank_. Risk- _ay_ ,' David reproved, being one of his Rye luncheon ladies. 'But,' he said, recovering himself, 'the important thing is he should love _her_ , you see. And for Durham and Hall to try and fix it like that—or to get in a bate about it, whichever way around it was—well, it just lowers them rather in my eyes, and I can't _abide_ that.'

'Poor David! This is where your glad sufferance of f—of foibles lands you: people let themselves down, and _you_ feel a rotter for noticing it. But before the fish course is over Durham will have said something frightfully owlish about socialists and you'll find him delightful again—listen, there's the gong.'

Frank checked his impulse to drink too much at dinner just enough to induce heavy sleep followed by invincible, dry-mouthed wakefulness at half past one in the morning. He lit a candle, padded into the study and gazed out of the window.  Moonlight poisoned and scoured the grass, thin clouds blew across the sky like gunsmoke, a copse in the middle distance loured jagged and malign. A shadow, extraordinarily like a man's, moved within it.  Despite the unprepossessing nature of the view, Frank was compelled by it. It seemed to call out to him _Come!_ And why should not he come? He could easily climb out of the window, and the moulding running a few feet under it would provide a toehold from which to drop to the turned-over flowerbed below. And _if_ he chose to come indoors before the maids got up at six, the parapet on the corner was both pitted enough to be climbed and close enough to his bedroom window to afford ingress. It was a boyish rag for a Fellow of King's College (lately appointed Tutor) to engage in, but harmless enough too. _Come!_ cried the herbage, grey in the chill moonlight; _Come!_ cried the bent and sinister elms.  He went back to his bedroom, took off his pyjamas, and put on tweeds, then threw open the sash and swung himself out.

As he crossed the lawn towards the copse he glimpsed the man-high shadow again, and here in the open air, sensed immediately, as if by scent, another human being at close quarters. The possibility of a criminal intruder did not strike him with any reality: the presence seemed benign, he realised, because he had joined it in outlawry _...let not us that are squires of the night's body be called thieves of the day's beauty. Let us be Diana's foresters, gentlemen of the shade, minions of the moon..._ he murmured to himself, and into the pause occasioned by his trying to remember what came between that and _under whose countenance we steal_ sounded a harsh voice, impossibly noisy and at the same time barely louder than a mutter, its bucolic accents tinged with deracination.

'You climbed out that window, sir,' it remarked redundantly, 'I wor standing here and I watched you do it.'

Like the lexicographer caught with the housemaid on his knee, Frank was surprised but not astonished.

'Who's there?' (He knew, though he could attach no name to the voice.)

The under-keeper stepped out from a cavern formed of shadow and blasted bole. Frank's scalp prickled with icy fire and something dusty and scratchy took up residence in the back of his throat.

'Should you be out here at night?' Frank swallowed, he feared audibly. 

'Should you?’ He added with calculated insolence, ‘Sir. Not doing any harm, am I? Same's you're not.'

'But—if anything were to—' Frank decided the discipline of his host's servants was none of his affair and shrugged.

'You mean if a body was— _molested_ in the night I'd be blamed? On'y if they knew I was out here. I know how I'm getting back indoors, too. Do you?'

'I'll climb that parapet. Or stay out all night.'

'Bloody parkey to be out till the slaveys get up, sir. You'd want something to keep you warm more than that.' He reached for Frank's lapel with a liberty that made futility of denial or resistance; holding it between thumb and forefinger like a fastidious draper, he took a step or two backwards into the crooked arms of the tree. His kiss was gentle, exploratory, a civilised inquiry. Frank found himself gasping, as their lips drew apart, 'Yes, I do, please, yes, yes, I do.'

'All right, sir. I know you do. There's the boathouse. I've a key for it.' He bent to pick up the shotgun propped inside the dry trunk.

Frank, about somnambulistically to follow, crashed into panic and plain fact.

'No! Stop. I mean—I don't know—'

'What's waiting for you down there?' The under-keeper looked satirical, but good-humouredly so. 'Naught but a good time, as it happens. I don't watch the garden on the off-chance a gentleman'll hop out his window and do something as I could blackmail him for. Twouldn't be worth my while.'

There was, Frank conceded as his right mind returned to him, a certain amount of sense in this, though given the circle that stayed at Penge, sustained application over a number of years could probably make it pay. 'What _do_ you watch it for?'

'You've got to watch of a night, don't you, sir?'

Frank understood this inscrutable pronouncement perfectly, and nodded.

'Are you coming, then?'

Moonlight got them to the door of the boathouse, where the keeper struck a match and ordered brusquely, 'Wait here.' He returned with a kerosene lantern and led Frank inside. The boathouse was dank and cold, but the man had made a sort of nest of tarpaulins, cushions and carriage rugs, as if he were in fact expecting company. His gun stood in the corner beyond it, guarding them. He set the lamp down beside the improvised bed and perched on the edge of it. He opened his arms. 

'Come here, sir.'

Frank dropped to his knees within the kindly compass, realising that he neither knew the man's name nor had told him his own.  'My name's Maddox—I mean, my Christian name's Frank. Do call me by it.'

'Funny how's you can get so far without introducing yourself, i'n't it, sir—pardon me. Mine's Scudder. Alec. But no more talking now—Frank.'

And so Frank shared what he had kept to himself for nine years. They drowsed then, necessarily in a close embrace against the freezing air.

Frank dreamed of David, who was his friend.

He woke rigid with cold, his jaw clenched tight. Pockets of warm air had been preserved between his half-clothed person and that alien one in his arms, but his shoulders were stiff and his limbs were beginning to tremble. An iron clangour resolved itself into the chimes of the church clock, but he had not counted from the first, and did not know if there had been four or five. The searing, hallucinatory pleasures of the last hours he understood slowly to have been real: he ached for and yearned toward Alec's body, even though he still held it, in sickened anticipation of its loss. As often, he tried to feel and think what a sensible person should, instead of what he really did: how could he face David after he had wilfully destroyed their chaste compact, and with a working man of whom he knew no more than his name? But he knew with a calm, settled certainty that he could, and would, and however transformed, their love would endure.

**Author's Note:**

> This is set after the close of _David at King's_ (with the desultory indications of a postwar setting for that novel cheerfully ignored), and in the winter before Clive Durham's engagement and marriage, but after his return from Greece and repudiation of Maurice's love. The suggestion that Scudder comes to Penge as the result of Anne's influence on the household has been handwaved of necessity; I've imagined that he was hired in the autumn of the novel's penultimate year rather than the early part of its final one.


End file.
